Читать книгу Walking in the Yorkshire Dales: South and West. Wharfedale, Littondale, Malhamdale, Dentdale and Ribblesdale онлайн

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To the north and on the high ground, the Yoredale rocks contain thin seams of coal of varying quality. These were intermittently mined from the beginning of the 14th century until the railway age, often from small workings called bell pits. The coal supplied domestic needs as well as being used on a larger scale to fire smelt furnaces and lime kilns. On the bleak top of Fountains Fell, coal was even processed in an oven to produce coke, a trouble worth taking to reduce the weight of the product to be carried down the hill. Another important source of fuel both for the home and the mines was peat, cut from turbaries (places where turf or peat is dug) on the upland bogs.

All these activities have long since finished, but not so the extensive stone quarries around Horton in Ribblesdale and at Linton, which serve the chemical industry and provide aggregate for building, roads and railways. Sadly, these massive workings are a scar on the landscape, a far cry from the earlier small-scale operations that produced stone for local building, walling and to produce lime fertiliser. At first glance, these old abandoned workings are now hardly distinguishable from the natural backdrop, something their modern-day equivalents might find harder to achieve once they have been worked out.